PM announces independent commission to study Power outage

Portugal’s prime minister announced on Tuesday that the government will set up an independent technical commission and request a European audit to assess the electricity systems of the countries affected by Monday’s power outage. “We shall spare no effort in clarifying a serious problem that did not originate in Portugal,” he said.

Luís Montenegro was speaking in the middle of the second extraordinary cabinet meeting in two days, at the prime minister’s official residence in São Bento, Lisbon, following the widespread power cut that affected Portugal and Spain on Monday.

The prime minister announced that the government would ask the European Union Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators to independently audit the affected countries’ electricity systems ” to fully ascertain the causes of this situation”.

“Secondly, we have decided to set up an Independent Technical Commission in Portugal to assess the mechanisms for reacting to and managing this crisis, the resilience and recovery of the electricity system, the resilience of critical infrastructures and services and also the functioning of the civil protection, communications and health systems,” he said.

The government will propose that this commission consist of seven personalities: an expert from the energy sector, an expert from the communications networks and systems sector, an expert from the civil protection sector, an expert from the health sector, and three personalities nominated by parliament.

Immediately after Montenegro’s opening statement, the ministers for cabinet affairs, the environment, Portugal’s minister of parliamentary affairs, and Infrastructure — who were in the front row—left for a meeting in parliament called by the speaker of parliament, José Pedro Aguiar-Branco.

The prime minister announced that the government had also decided “not to prolong or aggravate the energy crisis declaration”, which will end today at 23:59.

During the question time, Montenegro acknowledged that this committee would only be able to work in the next parliamentary term, since parliament is dissolved and there will be early parliamentary elections on 18 May, but he thought there would be time.

“We will have time, this is not an Independent Technical Commission to produce quick results in a hurry. It’s an Independent Technical Commission that deepens and evaluates reaction mechanisms, crisis management, recovery of the electricity system, infrastructure resilience, and critical services,” he said, giving as an example the commission formed following the 2017 fires.

Montenegro said that the government was “very committed to drawing all the conclusions about the causes and the responses” to what happened, expressing full availability to help the European bodies in the auditing process that the country has requested.